The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Artistic Duel that Sparked the Renaissance

Martin Herbert admires The Lost Battles by Jonathan Jones, a riveting account
of a Renaissance rivalry that shaped artistic history

By Martin Herbert

6:00AM BST 10 Apr 2010

The origins of art history are in storytelling: the discipline’s cornerstone, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), which mixes fact and fiction, is at heart an assemblage of rollickingly readable, improbably Olympian narratives. Of late, art history has come full circle, at least where it dallies with the mainstream. Seemingly modelled on books like David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s decade-old Wittgenstein’s Poker, the tendency is for intelligent views on the past to be filtered through alluring dramatic conventions such as fierce, creativity-sparking rivalries. Such was the case with, for example, Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles (2007). And it is true of Jonathan Jones’s The Lost Battles, which reanimates the giddy heights of the Renaissance through its evocation of a mighty scrap between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

The socio-political backdrop is intricate; the simplified version goes like this. It’s 1504, Italy is a patchwork of city-states gripped by magical thinking and the Florentine republic has long been mired in an intractable war with Pisa. The Head of State’s chief adviser, one Niccolò Machiavelli, wants to abandon a technocratic approach to warfare and rouse a citizen militia; he decides to inspire the people into patriotism – and perhaps influence the gods – by inviting the two greatest artists in the city (and the world) to paint murals depicting previous Florentine victories in the Great Council Hall. In the end, neither artist will finish his work. What go on display are merely full-scale preparatory drawings for Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina and Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, plus the section of painting the latter has completed.

By 1530, after various military assaults on the city, nothing is visible of either’s labours. Michelangelo’s drawing, Jones conjectures, was perhaps torn to scraps by admiring artists, after images based on these fragments resurfaced in subsequent art. Leonardo’s work? Nobody really knows, but the painting may have been covered over by Vasari in an effort to protect it. Even today, attempts are being made to release it from the plasterwork.

Jones has set himself a daunting task: to reconstruct murals that never existed through what can be gleaned – from tides of historical writings, from artists’ copies made at the time, from forensic comparisons with the makers’ other works – about preparatory drawings, themselves long gone. The stakes are high, since it’s Jones’s conjecture that this competition (to which Charles Nicholl’s 2004 biography of Leonardo devotes a mere handful of pages) is the crux of the entire Renaissance and a turning point in conceptions of the creative being. “Out of it came a new idea of ‘genius’ – of the artist as an enigmatic original – in which we still believe today,” he writes. It is the Renaissance culture of competition, raised to its zenith, which causes this: a face-off that inspires two artists to twist their work towards an unprecedented individualism.

In Leonardo’s case, this led to a “horrific revelation of the nature of war”, made by an artist who had seen the reality of carnage and cared little for fashioning visual propaganda; Michelangelo, meanwhile, decided to show butch soldiers in the nude, leaping out of a river to overpower the enemy, unarmed. Both artists were gay, but the younger Michelangelo, who Jones implies was more comfortable with his sexuality, created something new when the force of his carnal attention was transmuted into the intensity of his battle scene. Crucially, his muscular nudes chimed with the fact that “Machiavelli’s ideal of a citizen-soldier was, precisely, of young men so trained and honed that weapons were beside the point”. It may not be hard to predict who wins the contest and who is never trusted with a public commission again.

More than this, Jones argues that what lifts the pair to new creative heights is intense mutual enmity. At first, this isn’t convincing. An insult Michelangelo supposedly flung at Leonardo in public is given credence on a dubious basis (the source mentions Leonardo wearing a pink cloak; the artist’s notebooks list him as owning one), and subsequently repeated as fact. Jones then tells us, unhelpfully, that insulting was a Florentine pastime. Where’s the beef? It’s when we see solid evidence of Leonardo ensuring that Michelangelo’s David had its genitals covered with “metal underpants” – a symbolic castration – that conviction grows. By the time Jones is through with cross-referencing how the rivals responded to, deformed and built on each other’s work, the book’s title refers to the combative artists as much as their creations.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the book’s extended passages of lyrical criticism are its chief recommendation. Jones, here, is consistently evocative: the “drunken delusion of grace” in the arm of Michelangelo’s Bacchus; the “long perfection” of the Mona Lisa’s nose. In his day job as a critic at The Guardian, Jones often writes about contemporary art, but never as rapturously as he does here about the past. For all that The Lost Battles impressively smuggles seriousness into a populist format, what comes through most strongly is an irrepressible yearning: to live in times when art was expected to engage the populace, and when colossi walked the Earth.